The development of digital encoding and decoding for digital audio signals continues to have a significant effect on the delivery and enjoyment of entertainment content. Perceptual audio coding systems, which enable conveying encoded audio signals at low bitrates while maintaining perceptual quality of the signal when decoded, can employ techniques to characterize certain properties of the audio signal. Parameters can be used to characterize such properties. These parameters can, for example, indicate an energy or level of the signal as a function of time and of frequency. For this purpose, often a time/frequency grid is used. The grid includes a set of time segments, also referred to as time frames, and a set of frequency bands represented in each time frame. For each point in the grid, a respective parameter describes a signal property for the corresponding frequency band and time frame. The points in the grid are sometimes referred to as time/frequency tiles. With most audio signals, the parameters often vary slowly across time and frequency. Thus, time-differential or frequency-differential coding can be performed on the parameter to convey it efficiently, for instance, at a sufficiently low bitrate in a bitstream.